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Sometimes you may want to reset your changes to a specific commit. Suppose you chose git reset --hard <commit id>the -p way to reset your changes but forgot --hardthe -p flag would discard uncommitted changes on your local system and later realized your mistake. In this case, you can restore changes from a different scenario.

In this article, you’ll find ways to undo changes depending on the situation.

There were changes committed, now git reset --hardgone due to

This situation is one of the most common, and it's also the easiest to revert changes. If you ran git reset --hardand made modifications to your repository, run git reflog <branchnameto list all changes made in that branch, including resets. The output might look something like this,

116daf4 dev@{0}: reset: moving to HEAD~
adf3a51 dev@{1}: commit: changed authentication method
4f7fa8c dev@{2}: commit: updated readme
5eb37ca dev@{3}: commit (initial): Initial Commit

Now, we can see that the first log shows that we have reset devthe branch. Now, to revert the changes made in commit dev@{1}or adf3a51, you can run the command,

git reset --hard adf3a51

It will undo the changes up to that commit.

Changes staged but not committed

Recovering changes that were staged but not committed is a little more difficult than the above method, but it's still doable. First, you can use git fsck --lost-foundthe command to list git reset --hardall the commit hashes that were dangling before you used the command . You can git show <commit_hash>view the contents of a commit hash with . Now that you have the dangling commit hash you want to reset, use the command again git reset --hard <commit_hashwith the retrieved commit hash to get the commit you want.

Changes are neither committed nor staged

If you are still reading and stumble upon this method, it is probably not possible to undo git reset --hardthe command, because git does not stash changes that you have not added or committed. If you refer to the documentation for the git resetand --hardsections, it says that resets the index and working tree. <commit>All changes to tracked files in the working tree since will be discarded.

Since it seems unlikely that you can recover data from this state without too much trouble, it is better not to be in this situation and know the commands you are going to use and their flags.